Content warning: This article discusses mental health issues, drug use and assault.
Four years ago, David Lewis received a phone call from the coroner’s office in Washington DC. His oldest daughter, Carolina, a former college tennis player, had been found dead in a hotel room. She was 23.
Lewis would later hear a convoluted story about a night of club-hopping, a man in a disguise, Carolina’s panicked phone calls and the rendezvous with a stranger that preceded her death. But at that moment, all he knew was that he had lost a daughter.
The Lewises are tennis royalty in their native New Zealand. David, 59, had been a touring pro, as had his brother, Mark. Another brother, Chris, played in the 1983 Wimbledon men’s singles final, losing to John McEnroe.
For a time, Carolina and her sister, Jade, carried on the family tradition. When they showed promise on the court as young teenagers, their parents moved the family to the United States so the girls could chase tennis stardom.
Carolina became a standout, competing in Division I tennis at West Virginia and Kansas State. Jade was for a time even better, becoming a promising pro prospect who excelled in her only season at Louisiana State.
But soon it all went wrong. Jade entered a relationship with an LSU football player who abused her; she still struggles with the psychological fallout. Carolina spent her years in college tennis hiding the trauma of a sexual assault she told friends about but never reported to anyone else.
In September 2019, she was lying in a morgue wrapped in a sheet as her mother, Rosaria, leaned over to kiss her one last time.
The Lewises now spend their days battling their anger over what they see as botched and halfhearted investigations into Carolina’s death and Jade’s abuse. Even more, they regret the decision to come to the US. Tennis gave David Lewis an identity and a purpose, and it crushes him that his daughters’ pursuit of success in the game ended so horribly.
Raised on the tennis courts
For six decades, tennis has been the Lewis family’s identity, its livelihood, a source of all good things.
After David’s playing career ended, he was working as a tournament organiser when he met Rosaria La Pietra. They were married within months, and three years later, in 1996, Carolina was born. Jade came along two years later.
The girls started playing sports, especially tennis, when they were toddlers. That is what Lewises did.
The better at tennis they became, the more a move to the US made sense, given New Zealand’s small size and the lack of nearby competition.
In 2011, the family landed in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where David got a job at a tennis academy. Carolina was 15, and Jade was 12.
Carolina and Jade once won a minor pro event as doubles partners, but Carolina was never bent on becoming a tour player.
All she wanted from tennis was a college scholarship, and she got one, to West Virginia. She posted a 24-6 record in singles as a freshman and remained competitive as a sophomore against stiffer competition.
She also had an active social life, making a new friend seemingly every time she left her room.
“She could talk to anyone,” said Molly Trujillo, a West Virginia schoolmate who became Carolina’s closest friend.
But soon, Carolina lost some of her spirit, Trujillo said. Sometimes she just seemed sad.
Carolina confided in Trujillo and other friends that two wrestlers had sexually assaulted her during a night out. She never reported the incident to school officials or told her parents about it. David and Rosaria learned about what happened only after her death, when her friends told them.
Seeking a fresh start, Carolina transferred to Kansas State. She joined the tennis team and played her final season there in 2018.
But the memories of what had happened at West Virginia lingered. One day, the Lewises received a call telling them Carolina had overdosed on sleeping pills and was in the hospital.
Carolina told Trujillo she had started to indulge in harder drugs, including cocaine. She told Trujillo that even though she had plenty of friends, sometimes she felt so alone.
A sister in crisis
Jade had entered LSU in January 2017, attracted by the offer of a full, lifetime scholarship if she played one season in Baton Rouge for the Tigers.
Jade won co-freshman of the year honours in the Southeastern Conference, helping LSU earn a berth in the NCAA tournament.
But off the court, she was in crisis. Jade’s then-boyfriend, a star football recruit named Drake Davis, beat her multiple times beginning in 2017. Sensing Jade’s life might be in danger, David and Rosaria Lewis moved to Baton Rouge to try to protect her. Jade, fearing for her safety and unable to break away from Davis, refused to listen and became estranged from them, even as the threats and attacks piled up.
Eventually, she spoke out. USA Today’s reporting on Jade’s allegations against Davis prompted LSU to order an investigation and report by the law firm Husch Blackwell. In 2019, Davis pleaded guilty to battery of a dating partner and violating a protective order.
Jade said she still struggles with a sense of shame over what happened at LSU. It has contributed to feelings of emptiness that have led to two Adderall overdoses.
A tragic night out
Carolina graduated from Kansas State in the spring of 2019. At the end of the summer, she worked at the US Open, handling player logistics. Two days after it ended, she took a bus to Washington DC to visit Trujillo and other friends from West Virginia.
One night, Carolina, Trujillo and their group went to a bar called The Gryphon in northwest Washington. At The Gryphon, Carolina met Glenn Gibson, then 37, a former cop who had held various jobs since leaving the police department in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2009.
Shortly after midnight, Carolina and her friends, joined by Gibson, headed to a nearby nightclub called Abigail.
Carolina and Trujillo became separated inside the club, and just after 1.30am, Trujillo left.
If there were one thing Trujillo could change in her life, she said in an interview, she would go back in time and drag her friend out of the club.
Gibson would later say he saw Carolina leaving Abigail with a couple of men he said he did not know. A security tape confirmed this. One man had dreadlocks and wore a Halloween mask.
Gibson said he was on his way home about 2.30am when Carolina called him in a panic. She was at an apartment in northeast Washington. Could he pick her up?
Police have never determined whose apartment Carolina was in, but according to her text messages, the men there began fighting, and she grew increasingly afraid. She also told Gibson, “I did oxy.”
Around 3am, Carolina escaped the apartment and met Gibson on the street, climbing into his black Mercedes S600.
Detectives with the Metropolitan Police Department later recovered a nearly nine-minute video of Gibson and Carolina checking into the Liaison hotel near Capitol Hill around 3.30am. She was wobbly, leaning on Gibson. As the check-in process dragged on, he helped her to a nearby couch. A few minutes later, they headed up to Room 916.
According to Gibson’s statement to police, they showered, had consensual sex — a forensic analysis confirmed this — and fell asleep around 5am. He awoke a couple of hours later and left the room briefly to move his car. When he returned to the room, she was dead.
An autopsy later revealed her blood-alcohol level at the time of her death was 0.24, three times the legal limit for driving in Washington. Also, according to a toxicology report, Carolina appeared not to have taken “oxy”. She took fentanyl.
A coroner called the Lewises later that morning. Authorities would rule Carolina’s death a tragic, accidental overdose.
For the next several months, David Lewis pushed detectives to find out how his daughter had ended up dead of a fentanyl overdose in a hotel room with a man she’d known for only a few hours. He wanted police to figure out who had given Carolina the fentanyl and charge whoever was responsible with murder.
Just before Gibson picked up Carolina, she had received a call from a phone number connected to a convicted sex trafficker named Larry Holt. Police told David Lewis they could not establish the connection between Carolina and Holt, who refused to cooperate with investigators.
David Lewis also had suspicions about Gibson. He believed the toxicology report alone was proof his daughter had been sexually assaulted because the lethal level of alcohol and fentanyl in her system prevented her from giving consent.
However, the law — and juries — often distinguish between being incapacitated and being able to give consent, especially if victims became intoxicated voluntarily.
David, Rosaria and Jade Lewis are back in New Zealand now. Everyone in the New Zealand tennis world knows who he is and what happened to his family. He can sense their discomfort with the pain he has endured. So he tries to avoid that scene. Too triggering.
Jade wasn’t abused on a tennis court, and Carolina didn’t die on one. But when David tries to comprehend what has happened, when he reverse-engineers the last few years to see what he could have done to protect his daughters, his mind drifts to the family’s move to America and the pursuit of tennis excellence that inspired it.
To the Lewises, it feels like their traumas are still happening to them and will happen to them forever. It is not a matter of getting to the other side. They doubt the other side exists. Tennis was everything for a time for the family.
Now it’s something else — a road they wish they had never taken.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Matthew Futterman
Photographs by: Ruth McDowall; Lewis family
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Where to get help
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For more information and support, talk to your local doctor, hauora, community mental health team or counselling service. The Mental Health Foundation has more helplines and service contacts on its website.
